It’s an exciting time as four intrepid astronauts – Jeremy Hansen of the Canadian Space Agency, and NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch – head to the moon for a 10-day mission.
The powerful rocket blasted into clear skies at 6:35 pm ET Wednesday from the Kennedy Space Center, as crowds gathered along Florida’s Space Coast to cheer on the first crewed trip to the moon in half a century.
“After a brief hiatus of 54 years, NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said at a post-launch news conference.
The Artemis II crew will spend a day orbiting Earth, testing their capsule before firing the main engine that will take them to the moon, setting a distance record – traveling some 405,000 kilometers in space – in the process.
If all goes well, the crew will fly past the moon – but not touch down – in about six days. On a broader scale, NASA hopes this project lays the groundwork for future flights that take astronauts all the way to the surface.
As the mission is now underway, astronauts are testing Orion’s spacecraft systems. Here’s a look at some of Artemis II’s key objectives.
First steps
Immediately after launch, the solid white rocket boosters broke apart and scattered on the ocean floor, followed by the main stage.
Astronauts will not go to the moon. Instead, they will orbit the Earth in about 25 hours.
One purpose while in Earth orbit is to check the orientation of Orion.
An interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) will lift Orion into high Earth orbit before separating about four and a half hours after launch. The team will then bring the capsule within a few meters of the ICPS to test handling.
After the test, the ICPS will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and fall into the Pacific Ocean.
About five hours into the mission, four separate test CubeSats – inexpensive microwave-sized satellites – will be deployed.
On Day 2, the crew will fire up the translunar injection, or TLI, and put them on their way to the moon.
What will the astronauts do?
This is not a sightseeing tour. Astronauts will be hard at work testing programs and to carry out tests, some of which have already started on the ground. Others include testing how the human body reacts to space.
On Day 3, the astronauts will perform a CPR demonstration. While that may sound easy, remember, they have to do it in zero gravity.
On that day, they will also test communication with NASA The Deep Space Network (DSN), a global underground antenna system located in Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia. The network communicates with spacecraft in deep space, including New Horizons, which flew past Pluto in 2015, and the Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977.
WATCH | How Orion will call home:
Day 4 will be a bit quieter, with the burn-up of the orbital injector and a review of the lunar flyby imaging plans while, on Day 5, the astronauts will practice putting on their space suits and pressurizing them.
Day 6 is the day everyone has been waiting for. Astronauts will approach the moon, orbit and take pictures of the far side of the lunar surface. These are not tourist images, but objective images of scientifically important regions rarely seen on Earth.
Although astronauts went to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s, these missions may provide views of the far side previously unseen by human eyes, in part because some regions were not illuminated during the Apollo missions.
When astronauts are on the far side of the moon, they will experience what is known as loss of signal (LOS), meaning they will not be able to communicate with Earth for about 30 minutes.
Day 7 is a rest day, although the four crew members will be communicating with scientists on Earth about the flyby.
Days 8 and 9 will focus on testing Orion’s radiation shielding and manual testing, as well as testing a suit designed to help astronauts regulate blood flow.
Finally, Day 10 brings the crew home. Their return will be a critical test of Orion’s heat shield, which experienced problems during the aborted Artemis I mission. NASA says those problems have been fixed.
Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen headed to the moon on the Artemis II mission. He sits down with CBC’s Nicole Mortillaro to talk about the physical, mental and social aspects of training to go to the furthest place ever.
Of course, this is only part of the job. There will be other tests, such as testing the exercise wheel inside the capsule, which will be carried out by a Canadian astronaut.
They will also test laser communication as an alternative to radio and make the first ship-to-ship communication between Orion and an astronaut on the International Space Station.
Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen describes some of the science experiments the Artemis II crew will perform during their 10-day lunar mission early next year.
All of this is in preparation for a future mission to the lunar surface as part of the Artemis program. Artemis III, once planned for landing on the moon, has now switched to low Earth orbit docking with a lunar lander built by Blue Origin or SpaceX.
Artemis IV is expected to return astronauts to the lunar surface in 2028.
